Miroslav Vít

* 1945

  • "I was invited to some training in Cheb and a major came up and told the Border Guard legends how they were the best and what merits they had. And then he said, 'Don't be afraid to shoot, I shot two people myself.' That's what I said, no one will get me there anymore. And when we had to fill out questionnaires - who, how, who he was friends with, what languages one spoke - I wrote that I was fluent in English, German, some French, which was nonsense. I can only speak a little English. And relatives abroad - in Germany, in America, in Switzerland. And I had a friend next to me and he said, 'Dude, what are you writing?' And I said, 'You want to go to the border?' And he said, 'Don't be silly, I don't want to go.' 'So copy down a relative!' And we ended up on a job, and we were building scaffolding together to fix the plaster. It's amazing. Amazing!"

  • "And what I will never forgive them for - 1969. They always talk about 1968, and 1969 in Liberec was far worse shit. It was Czechs against Czechs. We came to see my parents and I learned from my mother - she was on crutches and had gone to lay a flower at the Liberec City Hall - how they shot about seven people there. And while she was there, suddenly the police raided the square and beat everyone who was there with truncheons. They wanted to beat my mother too, even though she was on crutches, but fortunately they dragged her to a shop, a jewellery shop, and there she survived the worst misery. We arrived in the afternoon, and the whole town was already besieged. The first cordon was the soldiers, they had brought them from Žatec, and sometime during the night they woke them up, the second cordon was the People's Militia, and the third cordon was the police. And I know that at night, it was already dark, there was cutting, no matter who it was, we were fighting with the police. And then towards the end, the policemen were shooting flares from Pražská Street. They were shooting flares at people! They were shooting it into the pavement, it bounced and flew among the people. Everyone knew it could kill. That's... Everybody knows that. I can't forgive that the Czechs were actually against the Czechs back then. That was the worst shit that could have happened. And the worst shit was that they never punished anyone from the People's Militia. Everybody got away with it. And they were pretty bad bastards."

  • "I was lucky enough to experience - they called it 'the golden age of tramping in the Jizera Mountains'. It was from 1960, until about 1964, when we went to the army. That was our strongest year. We were divided into North and South, the Southerners, they were such scum, they used to go to Turnovská, mainly to pubs, they always got drunk somewhere and made a mess. We were the right bunch that went to Fort Adamson, that's actually the Black Nisa. We only knew each other by name. You know, there was Kulhavej Áda, Tanvalskej Tom, Kenny, Špacír and all that. We didn't know anybody's name. We didn't care."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Frýdlant, 05.09.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 45:41
    media recorded in project Stories of the 20th Century TV
  • 2

    Frýdlant, 18.03.2024

    (audio)
    duration: 26:14
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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August 1969 was worse than August 1968 in Liberec, because it was Czechs against Czechs

Miroslav Vít in road troops during basic military service
Miroslav Vít in road troops during basic military service
photo: Miroslav Vít's archive

He was born on 29 May 1945 in Smiřice in eastern Bohemia, where his father František Vít had a small furniture factory. After its nationalisation, the family moved to Frýdlant in Bohemia, where his father took over the management of the furniture factory there. In 1954, he moved with his parents and two older brothers to the Harcov district of Liberec, where he finished primary school. After that he apprenticed as a plumber at the Land Construction Company in Liberec, then he joined the basic military service, which he served in the road army in Holýšov near Plzeň. In civilian life, he did manual work - he cut down trees in the forest, worked at the sawmill and in the stone quarry. In August 1968, he joined the scout centre in Frýdlant, which operated for two years. A year after the Soviet army entered Liberec, on 21 August 1969, he participated in protests against the Soviet occupation in Liberec. From 1970 he worked as a high-rise erector of steel structures. At the end of the 1980s he studied museum conservation by distance learning. In November 1989 he participated in the organisation of the demonstrations in Frýdlant and in December 1989 he was involved in the revival of the scout troop. After the Velvet Revolution, he and his wife ran a bookstore with an antique shop in the centre of Frýdlant. In 2023 he lived in Frýdlant.